Competitive Chess Boxing: Brain Meets Pain in Iceland

Two world-class competitors will battle it out in a boxing match in Iceland on Friday, with throngs of screaming fans cheering them on. In one corner will be Bjorn Jónsson, 42 years old but wily in his ways and with a devastating reach advantage over his opponent. Daniel Thordarson is a young, hard-nosed fighter and former Icelandic middleweight champion.

After weeks of anticipation, these two rivals will finally meet head-to-head to see who punches harder, who has the desire to outlast the other, and whether the Tarrasch Defense can sufficiently counter a Queen’s Gambit.

Wait, what was that last part?

You see, Thordarson and Jónsson are 3-D digital artists at CCP Games, a major videogame outfit in Iceland, and the two friends will actually be facing off in a traditional chess-boxing match at the seventh annual EVE Online Fanfest convention in the capital city of Reykjavík.

For the uninitiated, chess boxing is a rather simple sport that relies on more strategy that you might think. The match starts off with four minutes of speed chess. (That means each player gets only 12 minutes of total chess time allotted for the match.) Then, if the game has not yet been decided, they box for three minutes.

If no one gets knocked out, they take a one-minute break and go right back to chess for another four minutes. They keep alternating rounds of chess and boxing until someone either scores a knockout, gets a checkmate, or a player’s 12 minutes of chess time has been used up.

If the chess match ends in a stalemate, they’ll go the boxing judges’ scores to determine the winner. (And if the judges’ scores are somehow tied, the one playing the black pieces automatically wins.)

So there are quite a few things going on here, depending on whether you excel more with brains or brawn. You can use some measure of stalling techniques in the chess rounds, if you’re really confident you can pummel the guy while boxing, although match referees will issue warnings. (Excessive stalling or lack of chess moves can also result in a disqualification.)

The sport, which was conceived some 20 years ago and still in its relative infancy, has been huge in Russia, Germany and other European countries. It’s governed by the World Chess Boxing Association. Slogan: “Fighting is done in the ring, and wars are waged on the board.”

There’s not much of an American presence. There’s no national governing body, although David Depto has become something of a stateside icon among chess-boxing fans. But maybe we could take a lesson from our Icelandic friends and have a few Silicon Valley engineers go toe-to-toe in a bracket-style chess-boxing tournament.

You can’t deny it’s a pretty badass way of determining who’s “king” of the ring.